


way down we go

by toromeo (ald0us)



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: F/F, Genderbending, Hurt/Comfort, and also genderbent, before you kill me pls know this is completely canon divergent, in-depth discussion of past emotional and physical abuse, jon isn't an asshole, lots of rainy days and talking about feelings, or rather not talking about feelings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-25
Updated: 2018-11-25
Packaged: 2019-08-28 23:11:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16732443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ald0us/pseuds/toromeo
Summary: Maia finds she has more in common with Valentine's daughter than she'd like.





	way down we go

**Author's Note:**

> Please read the tags for warnings. This is a genderbend with fem!Jon, and is not even remotely canon-compliant. If you're concerned about the warnings in the tags, please check the end notes for more detail.

Maia pushed open the car door, the fresh, dewy air filling her nose. These days she could hardly remember what it was like before, when she was a mundane, but it was her senses that always managed to thrill her. She could smell each individual type of tree on the faint breeze, pine and oak and white ash, the wet heavy scent of the earth itself.  
  
She wouldn’t trade that smell for the world.  
  
Thanking the driver, she handed him the tip and pushed her leg out of the car, her boot sinking into the earth. It was soft—it must have rained. She quickly checked the address one more time before stepping out and shutting the car door behind her, starting up the driveway.  
  
Luke owed her so much even for coming.  
  
He’d been extremely secretive about why he’d summoned her out here to the middle of fucking nowhere, and it had definitely annoyed her, but it annoyed her more that she’d actually agreed to come. It was her pack now and he was a lone wolf—if anything, she should view him as competition.  
  
It wasn’t that bad, not really, but they hadn’t parted on good terms. She’d issued her ultimatum and Luke had chosen—chosen Clary. The shadowhunter daughter, the one he’d always chosen, always prioritized, always dropped and given everything to save. He’d left—turned his back on his pack, knowing full well he’d never be their alpha again. Maia had respected his decision, or had at least tried, but she couldn’t help but read the unspoken message: _no one comes back for you._  
  
But here she was.  
  
Luke was a good man, if not a good pack leader. He’d been there for her when few else could, and he’d done it without any expectation of return. And of course the pack couldn’t risk alienating him entirely—for all his flaws, Luke had connections and got shit done. A good sometimes-ally and a bad enemy.  
  
She was nearly at the house. It was a simple farmhouse, a but run down, but it had its own charm. Covered in dew it seemed almost to shine in the sunlight. Maia tried to imagine Luke puttering around tending to the flowerbeds and failed.  
  
Pulling her expression into something less of a scowl and slightly more like displeased, she raised a hand and knocked.  
  
The door opened a few seconds later, swinging back. A wary-looking woman with gorgeous, luminous skin stood in the doorway. She was wearing ill-fitting jeans and a large flannel, hair swept up into a loose bun. She couldn’t see the resemblance, but she had to guess this was Cleophas, Luke’s shadowhunter sister.  
  
“Luke called me here,” Maia explained shortly. “Is he here?”

  
From inside the cottage, Luke’s voice called, “Cleo, is that Maia?”  
  
Cleophas looked uncertainly from Maia to inside the house. There was a worried air about her that Maia didn’t like. “Are you Maia?”  
  
Before she could decide how to answer, footsteps sounded and the door was pulled further open. Luke pushed open the screen door, inviting her inside. He gestured to the couch, and she sat down. It was a bit old, but soft; he sat down in the armchair across from her. Cleophas hovered in the background, unreadable.  
  
“Thank you for coming,” he said, in that serious, yet down-to-earth way of his. It made Maia’s chest pang a little bit—despite everything, she missed him. “I’m sorry to ask you here, Maia, but I’m in some serious trouble with the NYPD. Nothing I can’t handle, of course,” he added, a bit unconvincingly.  
  
“Raphael and Lily’s people can sort that for you,” Maia said, hating the earnestness creeping into her voice. “Or Bat—apparently one of his uncles is a judge or something. Maybe Raphael could _encanto_ some people for you—or even Simon, he was getting real good at that—“  
  
She broke off. The mention of Simon was painful, too.  
  
“I appreciate it,” said Luke. “But this has gone beyond something that can be fixed with an _encanto_ , unfortunately. Ollie and I are working on it, but I’ll be gone for a while. I know I don’t have the right to ask anything of you, Maia, but I need someone I can trust to look over Cleo and...and someone else while I’m gone.”  
  
Maia blinked. Whatever favor she’d been expecting, this wasn’t it. “You want me to...watch the house?”  
  
Luke leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “Something like that. Make sure Cleo and Jon are safe, nothing more.”  
  
Maia’s eyes narrowed. He was making this whole thing sound deceptively easy—nothing was ever easy. “Who’s Jon?”  
  
Luke and Cleophas exchanged looks, and Maia’s sense of unease deepened. “Look, Maia, I hate to ask you for a favor when I left—the pack, but it’s important. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important—“  
  
“Luke, who the fuck is Jon?”  
  
Luke sighed, and Cleo looked anxiously out the window, and Maia was ready to jump up and strangle both of them. “Will you let me tell you without interrupting me?”  
  
Maia attempted not to roll her eyes, and mostly failed. “Fine, as long as you spill. Now.”

  
“You remember I told you that Valentine was once my _parabatai_ ,” Luke started, and fuck, he sounded tired. Maia could imagine the amount of pressure he was under. “He and Jocelyn...Jace and Clary aren’t his only kids. Well, Jace isn’t even really Valentine’s son. Jon is Jocelyn’s first daughter—“  
  
“Wait a fucking second,” interrupted Maia. “You want me to look after _another_ one of Valentine’s fucking crazy children? I’ve had enough of Jace and Clary for about the next twenty _years_ , thank you.”  
  
Never mind that she fucked Jace (Maia being the _subject_ in that equation, Jace the _object,_ grammatically speaking) and at one or two points would have fucked Clary too if she’d been down. What Luke didn’t know and couldn’t call her out on, the better.  
  
Luke looked apologetic. “You said you’d let me finish.”  
  
Maia sighed. “Fine. Keep going.”  
  
“Jocelyn left Valentine because he experimented on their unborn child. After the uprising—“  
  
“Oh, so she left him because of the mad scientist shit, not because he was a genocidal maniac,” interjected Maia. “Very nice.”  
  
“ _Maia_.”  
  
Maia pressed her lips together, somewhat sardonically, and waved for him to continue.  
  
“After the uprising, Valentine faked his and Jon’s death, and Jocelyn left for the mundane world, with Clary. Valentine...I don’t know if he ever cared for Jon or just turned against her as he became more extreme, or blamed her for Jocelyn leaving, but he...well, she hasn’t told me everything. But he wanted to make her a weapon, and when that failed, locked her up in a cabin in Idris. I found her when I went to rescue Clary from the Guard.”  
  
“Wow, if only I knew someone else who locked someone else in a tiny, claustrophobic room,” said Maia, bitingly as she could. “That would really be terrible.”  
  
Luke looked down, and she felt vindicated and bad at the same time—this was not the time to bring it up, but he did it, didn’t he? It was her right to remind him. Especially when he was asking her ridiculous favors after—  
  
After having proved he didn’t care about her at all.  
  
“She was chained in the basement for years,” Luke said, quietly. He was still looking at his clasped hands, not her. “Two or three, if I had to guess.”  
  
Maia swallowed. Being in that shed for less than hour had been horrible—terrifying. She was quite sure she would have gone completely batshit after two or three days, let alone years, which was not a comforting concept. Was that even possible? Was Luke just bullshitting her? “So assuming I go along with your totally insane request, which is a huge fucking if, what am I here to do? Make sure Valentine’s kid doesn’t have a bad day and decide to kill all downworlders?”  
  
“Jon isn’t violent,” Luke said, in a way that really wasn’t convincing at all. “She’s—she’s been through a lot, Maia. Hasn’t ever had anyone to take care of her. I don’t want to leave her alone.”  
  
There was a thick moment of awkwardness hanging between them as Maia thought, _but you could leave me_? “Why not your sister? Why me? If _la femme_ _Morgenstern_ is so calm and compliant.”  
  
To her surprise, Cleophas was the one who answered. “After my...last dealings with Valentine, my connections to the Angels as an Iron Sister were...severed. The transition has been difficult for me and I’ve been...what mundanes would call depressive. Sometimes forgetting to eat. Luke is worried about me.”  
  
That knocked the snarky winds from Maia’s sails, and for a second she felt bad for being an asshole. Clearly Luke didn’t want to ask, and she was just making it harder for him. The second after she felt bad for feeling bad. Why was it so hard to be angry? “I’m fine with staying with your sister,” she said at last. “But Valentine’s failed experiment? No offense, Luke, but I’m not exactly raring for that kind of thing. If something goes wrong, I answer to you, your sister, and...well, whoever gets hurt.”  
  
“I understand,” Luke said, and there it was, that grave, serious voice that broke her heart. The voice that had told her that Gretel was dead. The voice that told her he couldn’t leave Clary. “If you...want to meet her, she’s outside. And if...if you can’t, I understand.”  
  
Maia heaved a huge sigh. She should say no, tell him to stick it, and accept the consequences. But curiosity, and sympathy for all the shit Luke was in—some of that shit gotten into for the good of the pack—had a way of twisting her tongue. “Fine. I’ll go say hi to demon girl.”  
  
A ghost of a smile twisted Luke’s lips. “I wouldn’t call her that to her face.”  
  
Maia made a face. “Wasn’t planning on it, Luke.”  
  
He gestured towards the sliding window doors, which led onto the wooden back porch. There was a field and forest out back, and through the fog Maia could make out a figure chopping wood. Swallowing her misgivings, Maia got up from the couch and picked her way carefully to the door—fuck, she forgot to take off her shoes—and pried open the sliding door, stepping out onto the porch.  
  
The smell of pine and cedar was overwhelming, in a good way, that earthy freshness even more pronounced once the fog had rolled in. Maia strolled out onto the porch, feeling the wood steady under her feet, then made her way down the stairs and towards the lone figure in the field.  
  
Jon, unsurprisingly, was just about the whitest person Maia had ever seen. Her hands and forearms all but glowed in the fog, her hair white as milk. It was almost unnerving—had she never heard of a spraytan? She was tall, a bit taller than Maia but maybe a centimeter shorter with Maia’s heeled boots, and extremely thin, almost gaunt. Her hair was sheared short and uneven, as if she’d done it herself; she wore another huge red and black flannel, and Maia suspected it was Luke’s.  
  
She swung the woodcutter’s axe in a high arc and it crashed down on a huge log of wood; it split straight in two with a sharp sound. Maia couldn’t help but jump a little at the sound—she didn’t expect it to be so loud. A second later it was Jon’s turn to jump when Maia’s boot caught on a branch, making it crack and announcing her approach. Maia was surprised to notice her eyes—her irises—were completely black.  
  
Jon put down the axe, eyeing Maia up and down, suspiciously. Once she’d apparently decided Maia bore no immediate threat, she extended an abrupt hand. “Jon.”  
  
Maia accepted it, squeezing harder than she had to. Jon’s grip was painfully strong, but she didn’t seem to realize she was doing it and let go. “Maia.” She cast about for a way to start a conversation. “So you’re staying with Luke?”  
  
Jon gave a monosyllabic grunt that sounded vaguely like an affirmative and picked up the halves of wood, tossing them easily into a pile. Maia turned—the pile was enormous, as if she’d been at it for days. It was cold, but hardly _that_ cold—who started preparing for winter in September?  
  
Jon walked over to a pile of uncut wood and picked up a large piece of wood that should have _definitely_ been too heavy for her to carry so easily, even with shadowhunter strength, and set it down on the cutting stump. A wolf could have, definitely, but one in her state? Doubtful.  
  
“Did you know Luke before he turned?” Maia asked.  
  
Jon gave a grunt that sounded a bit like no and picked up the axe again. Another swing, a sound like a shot, and the wood split easily in two.  
  
Clearly not one for conversation.  
  
Sensing the futility of her actions, Maia muttered a half-hearted apology for bothering her and turned around and clomped back up to the porch. She hated humidity—it did a number on her hair, for starters. She also wasn’t a huge fan of monosyllabic shadowhunters.

  
Luke aimed a hopeful look her way when she pushed her way back through the sliding door, as if to ask, _how was it?_  
  
“She said exactly one syllable in five minutes,” said Maia.  
  
Cleophas nodded. She was holding a mug of tea, and there were two more waiting on the coffee table—ostensibly, one for Maia. “She doesn’t talk much.”  
  
“Does she do anything other than chop wood?”  
  
Luke and Cleophas exchanged looks. “Not a lot. She spends a lot of time outside, but doesn’t like to go very far from the house. She comes inside to sleep, and sometimes eat, and sometimes we ask her to stay inside if the weather is bad.”  
  
“She likes watching TV,” Cleophas input. “I think she’s rather taken with _The Sopranos_.”  
  
Figures. Murder and oppression were favorite shadowhunter topics. Maia caught sight of Cleophas’ runes and decided to keep that opinion to herself—at least, for now. “And how long will you be gone?”  
  
Luke and Cleophas exchanged another look—another bad sign. “About a month,” Luke said, hesitantly. “Maybe three weeks. Starting Monday.”  
  
That was a long time. As much as she wouldn’t mind a break from Rufus whining about not having a pack Netflix account— “Do you have Netflix?”  
  
Luke frowned, then looked amused, for the first time since she’d come. It was a relief, somehow. “Plus Hulu and Prime. Highspeed Internet too.”  
  
“All the way out here?” Maia was skeptical.  
  
Luke smiled. “I know a guy.”  
  
“For Netflix, I’ll do it,” Maia declared. “I have like, six seasons of RuPaul’s Drag Race to catch up on. But I expect you back in a month or I’ll find you and drag you back here myself.”  
  
Luke’s smile turned wry. “Noted.” He stood up, and Maia stood up too, and Cleophas watched them both. “Maia I—I know I’ve let you down. More than once. I—I wasn’t able to save Jocelyn, and I wasn’t the one to save Clary from the Guard, and...now I’ve lost you, too. And you’re doing this for me, even though I haven’t earned your help. But if you need me—please call on me. I couldn’t bear to loose you, too.”  
  
A lump stuck in Maia’s throat as she swallowed. She nodded, briefly, barely meeting his eyes. “Monday, then,” she said, with a paradoxically professional nod, then made her way to the door. She made it all the way down to the end of the driveway before she broke down.  
  
When the Uber finally came, her eyes were dry.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic will deal heavily with both Maia and Jon's experience of abuse and neglect from their parents and other figures, and will delve into canon-typical levels of physical and emotional abuse, keeping in mind that Jonathan's story is rather extreme in that respect. There may be future mention of sexual abuse or assault, so please read with caution.
> 
> Thank you for reading <3
> 
> Title taken from a [song](http://youtube.com/watch?v=v96wkt38EU8&name=Way+Down+We+Go) that probably everyone knows, that seemed to fit the story quite well.


End file.
